What is form?

Alf C. Zimmer

pp. 51-88

in: Liliana Albertazzi (ed), Shapes of forms, Berlin, Springer, 1999

Abstrakt

One of the central topics of discussion in Western philosophy has been the precedence of form over matter, or vice versa. For this reason the question "What is form?' has a strong traditional flavour and I have to admit that also my tentative answer from the vantage point of psychology, or to be more precise: from that of perceptual processes, is deeply rooted in philosophy. Democritus (fragment 13) distinguishes between genuine qualities in nature, like weight and size, and those which only emerge if nature is perceived, like colour and taste. In modern parlance,¹ this is the distinction between objects as they are and objects as they are seen from a specific point of view. In my opinion, the discussion about the primacy of either form or matter, especially in the Aristotelian tradition of thought, misses one important point: in perception neither objects are seen as isolated in space nor as spatial arrangements or geometrical projections unrelated to the projected objects. What is perceived are objects in situations or events which, except for very specific situations, are phenomenologically unique. Two examples can serve to illustrate this point. In Figure 1 an erratic line (A) is shown in two different contexts: while in (B) the oscillations are accidental and what is seen is a freehand drawing of a brick, in (C) these same oscillations determine the meaning, namely, an undulating plane with one vanishing point — in a way, what is accidental in (B) is substantial in (C), but in both cases the percept is unique.

Cited authors

Aristoteles